Allison’s graceful story shines on a difficult and heart wrenching topic; childhood grief. It is a treat watching Allison weave Shelly’s world where she is never quite alone, liberating herself by accepting her future through loss.

It’s a beautiful story exploring family, loss, grief, and love. It packs an emotional punch, while offering moments of lightness and humor as well, and overall, it is an excellent starting place for Mills’ work.

…it reveals a kind of haunting, a kind of ghost, that is much different than those normally portrayed in media. These ghosts are lost, not really all that dangerous though there is a feeling they could be, if pressed. (…) [Shelly] starts wanting to find one particular ghost, to heal one particular grief in herself. And yet the story explores how that’s not what ghosts are about. The ghosts don’t really exist for the living. Most of the time they don’t even remember the living that much. The ghosts are their own people with their own ways, and Shelly learns (slowly, with a few hiccups) that though she can interact with the dead, can help the dead, their presence or lack isn’t about her desires and demands.

Pro: The basic mechanics of dealing with ghosts are fascinating. The way grandma apologizes to Joseph for sending him on to the next world is amusing and poignant at the same time. And the way the police are so matter-of-fact about it all is pretty funny.

Con: There isn’t much of a plot here. Shelly does learn some lessons, but there’s little real cost to it.

I love this story so much it makes me hurt. I have a weakness for stories that manage to break my heart, and then stitch it back together, and this is such a story. Weaving together magic and spirituality, life and afterlife, childhood and adolescence, grief and family – with all its guts and glory – this story is both haunting (in more ways than one), and deeply moving. A must-read.

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Raised by her Aunt Dissy after her mother died, Cassie’s ability to connect with people through dreams has become a torture. The sight overtakes her literally like a force of nature. Each dream vision somehow ends up scarring her physically. (…) There are so many elements to Cassie’s character intertwined with her gifts; the people she meets and helps, and her own journey for balance and self forgiveness turns this story into a wild ride.

The prose is elegant and tied up in dreams because it is in dreams that Cassie has her Sight, that allows her to pierce the veil and see the future. Or some version of it anyway. She’s been told that she’ll not be lucky in love or money, but when a man shows up haunted by a woman he doesn’t know, things are pushed into wholly uncharted territory.

Pros: Cassie is an interesting character, and her gift is interesting in its own right.(…)Cons: Her problems all seem to happen because she won’t tell that man his fortune properly. She sure seems to stick with that position for a long time, and it’s not clear why it means so much to her to keep it from him. (…) In the end, nothing has been resolved.

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